That song, “Methamphetamine”, when I wrote it, it was in the context of having lived in this place in Appalachia, when the band was about two years old or something, we moved up to this part of the world in east Tennessee, western North Carolina, and it was like the month, the year, the season before the crank. It hadn’t arrived yet. The thing about the meth epidemic is that there was a time before the meth epidemic, when what we were doing was treating white corn whiskey like we treat meth now, the thing that was making people go crazy and berserk and was an epidemic and must be stopped was something that was being made by the very people who lived in those communities with inherent cultural traditions tied around them, illicit, yes, and deadly, true, but was being made at home by grandfathers and grandmothers and kids and being hustled all around these hills and hollers.
So in that story, the moonshiner, there’s so many songs about the moonshiner, from White Lightning to … wasn’t Robert Mitchum in that great film, you should watch this on Amazon, shameless plug, I can’t remember what it was called, it was a movie about going down and running whiskey.
The story is so powerful of moonshine running in the hills of Appalachia, that when it comes to when Old Crow got to those very hills, we wanted to make corn whiskey, and so we did. We figured out how to make it, we made a lot of it and we made it on our stovetop at first and in our bath tub with the corn and the yeast, making the beer and running the beer through our still which we made ourselves, and then we got into bigger stills and got a great big thump keg and started making it outside on a fire, running multiple gallons.

Ketch, on Methamphetamine, from Amazon's Side-by-side

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